A federal judge’s decision in Utah yesterday does not make polygamy legal, but it brings that possibility closer to reality. From a report by John Schwartz in The New York Times:

A federal judge has struck down parts of Utah’s anti-polygamy law as unconstitutional in a case brought by a polygamous star of a reality television series. Months after the Supreme Court bolstered rights of same-sex couples, the Utah case could open a new frontier in the nation’s recognition of once-prohibited relationships.

Judge Clark Waddoups of United States District Court in Utah ruled late Friday that part of the state’s law prohibiting “cohabitation” — the language used in the law to restrict polygamous relationships — violates the First Amendment guarantee of free exercise of religion, as well as constitutional due process. He left standing the state’s ability to prohibit multiple marriages “in the literal sense” of having two or more valid marriage licenses.

Judge Waddoups, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, wrote a 91-page decision that reflects — and reflects upon — the nation’s changing attitude toward government regulation of personal affairs and unpopular groups. The Supreme Court supported the power of states to restrict polygamy in an 1879 decision, Reynolds v. United States.

Judge Waddoups made clear that the Brown case was not an easy one for him, writing, “The proper outcome of this issue has weighed heavily on the court for many months.” He noted the shifts in the way the Constitution has been interpreted over the past century to increase protection for groups and individuals spurned by the majority.

“To state the obvious,” Judge Waddoups wrote, “the intervening years have witnessed a significant strengthening of numerous provisions of the Bill of Rights.” They include, he wrote, enhancements of the right to privacy and a shift in the Supreme Court’s posture “that is less inclined to allow majoritarian coercion of unpopular or disliked minority groups,” especially when “religious prejudice,” racism or “some other constitutionally suspect motivation can be discovered behind such legislation.”

The challenge to the law was brought by Kody Brown, who, along with his four wives and 17 children, stars in “Sister Wives,” the reality television show. The family argued that the state’s prohibition on cohabitation violated its rights to privacy and religious freedom. The Browns are members of the Apostolic United Brethren Church, a fundamentalist offshoot of the Mormon Church, which gave up polygamy around 1890 as Utah was seeking statehood. [cont.]

— Comments —

Nick writes:

Of course, we knew this was coming sooner or later. For what it’s worth, I now think it’s quite important to formulate secular arguments for social conservatism, for reasons such as these. What a difference a year can make.

 Laura writes:

There was no shortage of secular arguments against same-sex “marriage.”

Joe A. writes:

Thank you Boomers, for all your self-righteous sanctimony against long-established customs and traditions. It is entirely possible you’ll manage to complete your destructive mission before you go to that Great Happening in the Sky. Or wherever.

Buck writes:

Joe A. seems to have a mad on for us Boomers. His slam is indiscriminate (who remembers “slam books” from the 50s?). Boomers were not the cause-all, not the beginning of the end, not even the end of the beginning.

Boomers are generally defined as being born between 1945 and 1964. Our parents were running the world after the war, not us. Grade schoolers, high schoolers and college students didn’t dictate public and cultural policy when I was growing up.

I’ve made several arguments, though I don’t see it as clear-cut blame, that it was the Greatest Generation who lifted the lid on the modern liberalism that simmered to a boil in post-war, 1950s America. Were they victims of something that they never saw coming, or that they had secretly desired for years?

The Boomers did nothing to stop it. But, no force has resisted modern liberalism in any significant or measurable way. Each successive generation conceded more. Every important institution finally capitulated.

What we’re seeing is the continuing, growing results of a modern liberalism that has always existed. It surged out of the war, into the 50s and turned the nation on its head in the 60s.

One social policy, alone, did more damage to America and to the Boomers themselves, than any subsequent generation have been able to repair, and seems willing to deem damage.

In 1969, Ronald Reagan, a World War II generation parent and politician, signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce bill. Reagan, the last of the “conservatives”, acted to stop the growing culture of lying and fraud by lawyers, husbands and wives who had to “prove” fault to get a divorce. The new law eliminated the need to lie about your spouse to get a divorce. “But no-fault divorce also gutted marriage of its legal power to bind husband and wife, allowing one spouse to dissolve a marriage for any reason — or for no reason at all.”

From 1960 to 1980, the divorce rate more than doubled. Those were not all Boomers. No-fault divorce became universal and morally legitimate. Boomer attitudes were more a result of that, than the cause. More men, than women, were divorced against their will. Most of those men did nothing more than fail to keep their increasingly enlightened wives happy. Individual happiness outweighed everything. Seeds for same-sex marriage.

Then, in 1959 President Eisenhower (my second president) said in a press conference that birth control “is not a proper political or government activity or function or responsibility” and adds emphatically that it is “not our business.” That year a half-million women claimed a bogus menstrual disorder in order to get a pill that coincidentally works as a contraceptive.

The next year, 1960, when the oldest Boomer is fifteen (I’m twelve), Searle’s annual sales go through the roof for their “menstrual disorder” pill. Within weeks the FDA approves the first-ever drug to be given to a healthy person for long-term use.

Those women were not Baby Boomers. The FDA and the drug companies were not run by middle school or high school age Baby Boomers.

There have been a host of nation-killing public policy decisions for which Boomers have zero responsibility; the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 1965 Immigration Act, are just two. I was sixteen and seventeen.

It seems to be getting progressively harder to pick the right parents.

Laura writes:

Liberalism has been evolving for hundreds of years.

James N. writes:

There is no argument, and especially no legal, constitutional argument, in favor of pretended homosexual marriages that is not a much more forceful argument for polygamy.

It’s a curious cultural artifact, nothing more, that homosexualism has preceded polygamy to the bar. In fact, since boys are no longer being socialized to become husbands, the current and future husband supply is quite constrained. Given the fact that 95 percent of girls still want to marry (or at least want a wedding), polygamy seems inevitable.

Of course, the arguments for the state to collaborate in pretend marriages are fatally flawed to begin with, but that’s another topic.

 Laura writes:

In fact, since boys are no longer being socialized to become husbands, the current and future husband supply is quite constrained.

Good God, you’re right. I never thought of it that way.  Think of all the girls with male friends who are effeminate and one can envision some of these girls eventually becoming satellites to a single real man.

James N. writes:

The argument could be made (not by me, of course) that the status of a plural wife is better, more secure, and healthier than that of the latest mistress.

And, God never called polygamy an abomination. He never rained fire and brimstone over it. Nobody got turned to salt over it.

Prepare yourselves. It’s one Justice Kennedy opinion away.

Jay writes:

I remember having this discussion with others when the first sodomy laws were being abolished. I explained that since the law is written by lawyers to be purposely vague to mean whatever they want it to mean whenever they want it to mean it, there would be absolutely no reason not to permit homosexual marriage, then multiple marriages, and finally the age of consent being lowered to zero. I was of course informed I was just a right wing crazy. I wonder what they think now?

It is only a matter of time before those adults who wish to marry children will also be permitted to do so based on precedent. Sick and horrible, but no less true I am afraid.

On a happier note, Merry Christmas, Laura!

Laura writes:

Thank you.

And the same to you!

Hurricane B. writes:

At its core, there’s no difference between polygamy as most people think of it, and endless promiscuity/serial monogamy.  The self-described polygamists are just a little more honest about what they are up to (sex with multiple partners); let’s call a spade a spade, shall we.

So long as girls aren’t forced into these Mormon-type polygamy situations, who are we to decide that  formal polygamy is objectionable when normally married people are at the same time unfaithful to their one spouse,  or the single ones are doing it with all and sundry?

As to the mixed-up families in the formally polygamist household, why is that any worse than the “blended families” of serial monogamists?  I’ve been to social occasions where you’d need a computer to sort out who was related to whom.  I know women married three times with children by all the different husbands.

Laura writes:

Yes, we already live in a polygamous society, but that does not make the idea of legalizing polygamy, in the traditional meaning of the word, any more acceptable. “Who are we to decide?” It is not for us to decide. “We” don’t decide. Polygamy is opposed to human nature and the common good. In the desert society of the Patriarchs, polygamy made some sense, but we don’t live in that world. Whether it be serial polygamy created by divorce or traditional polygamy with one man married to multiple wives, polygamy is objectively wrong.

As Louis de Bonald, the 18th century French statesman wrote in his great book on marriage Du Divorce:

The plurality of unions or polygamy — whether potential, through the faculty of repudiation, as among the Jews, or actual, through cohabitation, as among the Turks — can be tolerated for families in that purely domestic state of society which precedes any public establishment and is called the patriarchal state, or when, having recently left that state, families retain its habits: because the multiplication of the species, which polygamy encourages at this age of society alone, may be appropriate to a small tribe which is trying to raise itself to the strength and dignity of a nation.

This law is not contrary to physical nature, since it does not prevent the reproduction of beings, and several children can be born to a single father and several mothers; but it is imperfect in moral terms, because it breaks moral unity or the union of hearts, by placing several societies in a single family, and several interests in a single household.

Alex writes:

Legalizing polygamy would be the final strike in the elite’s destruction of the family and any possibility of decent, dignified life for lower-class whites. If some well-off whites get to have two or more wives, some lower-class whites, unable to compete with them, will have no chance of ever finding a wife. It would be the ultimate manifestation of the elite’s hatred of non-elite whites.

Laura writes:

I don’t see the class-warfare dimension of it. Alpha men of all classes stand to gain from any kind of polygamy.

I also don’t think we’re going to see Mormon-like polygamy spread quickly.

Alex writes:

Call it class warfare or not, but somehow every new liberal (i.e. white-elite) cause results in more dysfunction among and dispossession of lower-class whites (blacks have long been destroyed). Immigration, destruction of the family, outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, religious decline – white working class hardest hit. The marriage rate and percentage of children born out of wedlock among low-class whites are racing toward those of blacks.

They are methodically working on making more whites into Democratic voters. This doesn’t sound any better than “class warfare” to me.

Even if the hypothetical legalization of polygamy would benefit the most-competitive men of all classes, it would still be the less-competitive men of the lower classes who would be left without wives. The losers in the higher classes would still get wives from a lower class than they’d otherwise prefer, but where would the low-class losers find women? Only by stealing them from blacks and Hispanics, further raising tensions between low-class whites and these minorities, which (like the miscegenation) would be another plus for the elite. “Alpha men” among low-class whites may stand to gain, but low-class whites as a whole would lose.

Of course polygamy, if ever legalized, wouldn’t spread quickly. But speaking of Mormons: notice that the Times’ writer – named Schwartz and the author of a “memoir about raising a gay son” titled “Oddly Normal”, i.e. not a Mormon sympathizer in all likelihood – is strangely nonchalant about a judge weakening a Utah law against polygamy. He and his editors realize that an increase in polygamy among Mormons would increase tensions in their society, weakening it.

By the way, polygamy’s destabilizing effect on society is precisely why Islam allows it. The permission to have four wives plus concubines was designed to promote the spread of Islam. When the well-off can buy multiple wives and concubines, there is a significant population of poor young men who face the prospect of never finding a wife in their own land. These men will form bands going off to conquer neighboring tribes, capture their women and take them as wives, thus spreading Islam to new lands. They also provide a constant supply of eager soldiers for Islamic rulers to form armies to conquer new lands for Islam, with the soldiers motivated by the prospect of capturing women to take as wives. The purpose of Islam is not to make peoples’ lives better or create harmonious societies but to conquer the world and all other gods for Allah, and the permission of polygamy serves this purpose.

 Laura writes:

Yes, polygamy, in any form, whether it be the serial polygamy created by legal divorce or ancient polygamy, doesn’t decimate the lives of the well-off to the same degree that it does those of the lower social strata.

And, absolutely, polygamy serves the political purposes of Islam.

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